Prof. Judea Pearl elected as American Statistical Association fellow

Apr 23, 2019

The American Statistical Association recently announced their 2019 cohort of fellows with UCLA’s own Computer Science Professor Judea Pearl being one of the named fellows. The designation of ASA Fellow has been a significant honor for nearly 100 years. Under ASA bylaws, the Committee on Fellows can elect up to one-third of one percent of the total association membership as fellows each year.

He will be recognized on the evening of Tuesday, July 30, 2019 at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Denver. The awards ceremony will be held at the Denver Convention Center during the ASA President’s Address and Founders and Fellows Recognition.

Judea Pearl was one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences. He has also contributed to the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, human cognition and machine learning. Pearl is described as “one of the giants in the field of artificial intelligence” by UCLA computer science professor Richard Korf. His work on causality has “revolutionized the understanding of causality in statistics, psychology, medicine and the social sciences” according to the Association for Computing Machinery.

Pearl has been a UCLA faculty member since 1970. He received the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty. In 2018, he was one of three emeriti faculty who received UCLA’s Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award, which recognizes distinguished achievements following retirement. He also is the author of a recently published book about the science of causality.